Creative director John Epler and game director Corinne Busche talk about the romances in Dragon Age: The Veilguard — and dish on the NPCs who get together.
As is expected from Dragon Age, there are romance options galore in Dragon Age: The Veilguard — and the fan discussion on which non-player character to romance began months before the game even came out.
Unlike previous Dragon Age games, in Veilguard, all of the recruitable companions are romanceable no matter your Rook’s race or gender: optimistic scout Lace Harding, confident Grey Warden Davrin, spunky elven historian Bellara Lutare, cynical detective Neve Gallus, erudite necromancer Emmrich Volkarian, tough dragon fighter Taash, and pragmatic assassin Lucanis Dellamorte. The romances run the gamut from steamy to nail-bitingly awkward (complimentary), but no matter who romances who, the relationships feel true to the characters and how their arcs progress.
“There’s so many different flavors of romances with the characters that even if one doesn’t work for you, one of them I think is likely to,” creative director John Epler told Polygon. “But they’re so tied to the character arcs that they become part of that character development as opposed to ‘and also you can romance them on the side.’”
[Ed. note: This post contains spoilers for Dragon Age: The Veilguard.]
For instance, Epler said, Bellara’s romance is purposefully awkward and stilted. (“As Bellara’s writer, I’m very familiar with it,” he added.)
“It’s clearly somebody who doesn’t see themselves as someone people are going to want to romance,” he said. “And so one of my favorite things is paying Bellara a compliment, and she takes it in the most awkward [way]. Because she herself as a character, and something you see through her arc, has these issues with how she sees herself, especially after what happened in her past. And so that romance kind of plays off of that as somebody who does have, I wouldn’t say necessarily low self-esteem, but has issues with self-regard.
